Family Stories Come to Life in Port Colborne

As a child visiting the Port Colborne Historical & Marine Museum on school trips, Meghan Chamberlain delighted in dressing up and sitting in the tiny log schoolhouse, pretending to be a 19th-century schoolgirl. Now the museum’s coordinator of community engagement, Chamberlain credits it for helping her see her hometown in a whole new light.

It’s all about the stories. Port Colborne is a township rooted in industry, Chamberlain says, thanks to the Welland Canal and the nickel plant. “For the families here, that’s what their lives were made up of.” The museum — located about a block from the canal — relays the rich histories of those families with its displays and exhibits sourced from a collection of 26,000 artifacts. The property was donated by local businesswoman Arabella Williams, who died in 1950. Two decades later, a group of locals banded together to turn the family home into a museum, opening it to the public in 1975.

The grounds hold a collection of relocated and reconstructed heritage buildings, including a blacksmith and machine shop, a log home that portrays the typical farmhouse lifestyle circa the 1840s, and a weaving shed that showcases fibre arts. Then there’s Chamberlain’s favourite: the log schoolhouse, which was one of the first in the region. Marine history enthusiasts can explore a park that boasts a 50-passenger lifeboat, a 5,000-pound anchor from a ship that sank near Port Colborne in 1911 and a wheelhouse from a 1946 steam tug. The Carriage House showcases the Williams family’s original carriage, while a former cottage is the setting for Arabella’s Tea Room, the longest-running volunteer-operated tearoom in Canada.